Monday, September 08, 2008

1. If you give a bunch of medical students pagers, many of those pagers will go off during the very next lecture.

2. If you train and test medical students in anatomy, physiology and pathology for two years, when you give them a schedule saying "Monday - On Call" they will likely have no idea what this means or what they are supposed to do. Or if they should bring their pagers.

3. Lectures by fourth-year students explaining what "being on call" means and what to do when on call are very helpful. Lectures by senior faculty describing the abstract, theoretical concepts of effective learning aren't so much.

4.Rounds are not to be confused with rounding. Rounds come in two types, teaching and grand. While teaching is done on grand rounds, it is not the same as teaching rounds. Likewise, teaching rounds are not necessarily grand, though I suppose they could be, in the same way that nice people can be jolly. Of course, the internet phenomenon Grand Rounds is entirely different and could be considered a third type.5.Properly scrubbing for surgery as a medical student simply involves making sure you scrub your hands for longer than any of the other surgeons or residents.

6.Every time we need to write in a patient chart, we need to write the following:

a pencil-sketch drawing of ourselves acting out a favourite childhood memory

and which character we most resemble on the TV show Scrubs.

Oh, and we have to write something about the patient, too.

7. A hospital tour by a doctor who helped design the hospital will be much more engaging than a tour by an administrator who is reading the signs on the walls.

8. Suturing can be difficult, because if the real thing is anything like our training sessions, our patients' skin will be thick, easily bruised, very fragile, yellow, and smell and look like banana. (There was an "issue" with the bureaucracy with bringing in pigs' feet, as we've used in the past.9. The summer is plenty of time to forget all the things medical you learned in the first two years of medical school.

10. Even if you remembered everything from the first two years of medical school, you would still know pretty much nothing compared to what a doctor knows.

Love it. Re Number 8 - nothing will ever prepare you for suturing the heel of someone who has not worn closed shoes in 10 years. The force it will take to pierce his skin (with the best of needles) will cause the instruments to bruise your thenar eminence causing you to freak out the next day that you accidentally stabbed yourself. And re Number 10: - I often think that it I learn more basic science stuff now through the clinical lens. I certainly learned more immunology when doing honours where I took blood from patients who I also got to talk to a number of times, than from lectures and cartoon animations about T cells.

Vitum Statisticus

Vitum Finus Printicus

See footer.

*Finus Printicus

Updated 7/07.If you have been my patient, identifying information about you will never be found on this blog. If you do think a story here is about you, I can assure you that is coincidental. After hearing about HIPAA and signing confidentiality forms of my own, and reinforced after I was quite stunned to read the news reports and medical blogging community response to a medical bloggers who have gotten in big doo-doo after accusations of breaching a patient's right to confidentiality in their blogs, I've decided to reaffirm that while my hospital and med-school experiences allow me to get an idea of what happens in medicine, those experiences do not end up here as they actually happened. In order to protect the identity of the patients I interact with, and to protect the opportunity for me to continue blogging, any patient and situational information published here (for example, complaints, diagnoses, age, occupation, definitely names, possibly outcome and heck, even gender) is fictional and has nothing to do with the patients I see. Most accounts written on this blog are inspired by real medical experiences but have been changed to the point that they are entirely fictional; if a post reminds you of an experience you had with a doctor, that is coincidental. I have programmed Blogger to give me a reminder to never compromise the identification of patients that I've seen whenever I am about to write a new post. You wouldn't want your personal info being posted on someone's blog in a way that a reader could figure out that it was you, and you wouldn't want to be entirely open with a physician if you knew s/he was just dying to run to his computer and tell the world about your secrets. You are welcome to read this blog as if the events depicted actually happened, since that's probably more exciting, but the patient encounters you read here never did happen.This blog is not meant to be a substitute for consultation with a qualified medical professional. E-mail addresses I'm provided with through e-mails or comments are never distributed, sold, spammed, or abused by me. Contents are indeed copyright: this means they're the author's property, and you need prior express written consent from the author to do any of these: distributing, broadcasting, copying, copying and pasting, transmitting, altering, selling, presenting, and the like. Especially the like.